CHANUKAH EDITION 5776 LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
I.
There’s no place like home, as Dorothy famously proclaimed in “The Wizard of Oz,” and yet, conversely, like the title of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.
Dorothy’s violent uprooting from her farm, chased by an evil nemesis, her surreal travels through a cyclone that ultimately landed her in a Goldene Medinah, could be a metaphor for European Holocaust survivors who, following their cataclysm, made a new home in the United States and other corners around the globe.
Their journey to Oz was not an illusion, or a nightmare, from which one could awake. Unlike Dorothy they could tap their heels ad infinitum but would never be transported back to their pre-catastrophe lives. No matter how deeply they felt, like Dorothy, that there was no place like home, Holocaust survivors were forced to inhabit Wolfe’s world, where no one can return home again — since home, as they knew it, had ceased to exist.
The people of Edelény, Hungary, it seems, tried their hardest to create a space somewhere in between.
II.
On April 10, 2015, in the IJN issue preceding Yom HaShoah, I wrote an essay about my travels to Hungary a few years earlier in search of my great-grandmother Shaindel Marcus’ burial site. As I set off on my trip, I considered genealogy primarily an avocation of dates and lists. By the time the implications of my trip unfolded, I learned that genealogy is so much more.
Shaindel’s daughter, my grandmother Lila Silberstein, was a Holocaust refugee who left her family behind in eastern Hungary, never to see them again. After the war, someone wrote to tell her of her mother’s demise in the ghetto of Edelény, where she was on an extended visit with her married daughter, Esther.
While my journey did not end in a fairy tale full circle, I felt a sense of accomplishment, especially after I spoke to my grandmother about the trip and presented her with her mother’s death certificate, nearly 70 years after the fact.
The mystery of my great-grandmother’s final days remained, yet, for me, the story was over — or at least on hold.
Despite not fulfilling its initial goal, my journey to Hungary was far from fruitless. Writing about my trip connected me in a new way to people I had known nearly my whole life and ultimately led me to contact the one woman still alive who knew the family whose story I was seeking.
On the Saturday evening after the article came out, I got a call from my mother: “Did you see Dov Mogyoros in synagogue? He was looking for you; you’ll never believe it — his family is from Edelény!”
The Mogyoros family, whom we have known since settling on Denver’s East Side in 1983, is from Edelény? Of course, I knew they were Hungarian; the whole family, including all four sons, is fluent in that mystifying Magyar tongue. They also have that genteel Hungarian je ne sais quoi.
But from Edelény — the same tiny town of around 50 Jewish families where my Great Aunt Esther had lived? A remarkable coincidence, indeed.
III.
In the meantime, other extraordinary developments were underway.
In the mid-2000s, my mother had asked me to search the Yad Vashem database for information about my grandmother’s beloved sister, Esther Marcus Klein, and her children. I am a lover of history and of genealogy and this was the moment that my journey into my grandmother’s family took off. As a child, I had been mesmerized by my grandmother’s black-and-white photo album stored in the bottom drawer of a cupboard, a relic of another time, filled with unknown stories about unknown people.
Tragically, through Yad Vashem, I found testimonies of Esther’s death, along with the deaths of her four children.1 Date of death: 1944. Place of death: Camp, Auschwitz. Signed: Miriam Glattstein. Address: A neighborhood in Jerusalem . . . around the corner from where I lived as a young child.
I told myself I would try to find this Miriam Glattstein. But then I told myself there’s no way she’s living there anymore; in fact, what is the likelihood that she is even still alive? (Turns out I was wrong on both counts.) Then, on my trip to Hungary, I discovered that one Chaim Glattstein had reported my great-grandmother’s death to the municipality. Back home after my trip, my grandmother confirmed that Miriam Glattstein was the person who informed her about the tragic demise of the Edelény branch of her family. Somehow, I was led to believe or assumed that Miriam Glattstein was the sister of my grandmother’s brother-in-law, Ferenc Klein. This mistaken notion cemented my assumption that Miriam Glattstein was no longer living, as my great-uncle would have been well past 100.
Publishing the article rekindled my interest in finding Miriam Glattstein or, at the very least, her family. With the help of online tools I began to reconstruct the family tree. I made an important discovery: Miriam Glattstein was not the sister of Ferenc, but his niece. My stomach dropped. Suddenly, there was a chance she was living.
I posted a few notes on genealogy message boards, and an email came back: “Miriam Glattstein is still living. She has two daughters. I will pass on your information to them.” Tears came to my eyes; was this really happening? The one person who knew what happened to my grandmother’s beloved sister — she’s alive.
Just recalling that moment now, I am struck by the same gratitude to G-d, to fate, to whatever it might be, that my story did not become an “if only . . . ” When I think that I could have missed this opportunity . . .
I emailed Miriam’s daughter, Irit, immediately; we settled on her writing in Hebrew, me in English. Her mother was keen to speak with me and share her memories. We set up a time to talk.
I spoke to Miriam Glattstein, both of us to some degree in broken Hebrew. She remembered my family well.
She remembered my great-grandmother, Shaindel, for whom I’m named, from her visits to Edelény before and during the war. Miriam’s recollections matched perfectly with my grandmother’s description of her mother: quiet, composed, a loving mother and grandmother, always dressed in black (her husband had died years earlier).
She recalled the joy that the Klein family (my Great Aunt Esther and her husband Ferenc) felt when they had a boy, Tibor, after three girls, Edith, Kati and Zsofi. In fact, Miriam’s mother performed the bris!
There is the image she will never forget: riding in a train with Esther and her four children, en route to Auschwitz. “None of them returned,” says Miriam now, somberly, more than 70 years later, just a few months short of celebrating her 90th birthday.
To find someone still living who knew my great-grandmother reinforced my passion for family history. From my childhood I loved hearing stories about Grandpa Harry (Harry M. Harris), who grew up in the Cleveland Orphan Home and came to Colorado to strike gold. Or Grandpa Yechiel Goldberg, a Lithuanian immigrant who died of the Spanish influenza just after WW I, here in Denver. But I’ve come to a conclusion about family history: Truly to feel a connection to someone whom I’ve never met, I need to meet someone who actually knew this person.
And now, here is a person, Miriam Glattstein, who knew — and most fondly recollects — Esther and all her four children. They were real.
With Holocaust victims, it can be especially hard to make them come alive. So many died young, before their personalities were fully formed. Others perished along with their entire families, rendering it impossible to know who they really were.
The first time my great aunt’s children became real to me was when I read their names on the Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony. They were no longer an amorphous group of victims, but individuals, each with his or her own name.
And the nicknames! Kati (Katherine), Zsofi (Zsofia) and Tibi (Tibor). It was clear that whoever filled out these forms knew these children well, and that these children were beloved by their parents, their names diminutive tokens of affection.
Their tragic fate in the Holocaust cruelly robbed them of the opportunity to live their lives, and robbed their future extended family, myself included, of ever knowing them — or, even worse, of even knowing what we were missing. The Holocaust transformed them for future generations into statistics, numbers.
For me, this genealogy journey brought them back to life and gave them identity.
My grandmother, Lila, who passed away on August 19, 2014, had been the last known living link to her sister Esther and to Esther’s eldest child Edith. It’s unclear whether Lila met Esther’s second child, but she certainly never met the youngest two, who were born after my grandmother fled Europe.
When Miriam Glattstein recollected babysitting these four children, the affection discernable in her voice, I, for the first time, recognized these children, my first cousins once removed, as real, living people. They are no longer forgotten.
IV.
By the time I sat down with Aniko and Dr. Miguel Mogyoros to hear their story of Edelény, this remote northern Hungarian town had become a familiar place, and not just because I had visited it.
The Mogyoroses knew the Glattsteins, the family to whom I am related by marriage; in fact, the Mogyoroses knew just about every Jewish family that lived in Edelény. It turns out that Edelény was incredibly close-knit and the families who managed to survive kept in very close contact following the war, across the continents.
“Listening to all the people from Edelény, you would have thought it was the middle of the universe,” recalls Aniko with a chuckle. “I mean they talked about Edelény as the most wonderful place.”
One only has to visit Edelény today to see the humor in the statement — Edelény has slipped far, far from its former glory days — but Aniko’s perception is testament to the larger-than-life role a place can play in family lore.
Miguel Mogyoros’ father, Alejandro (Sandor in the original Hungarian), was from Edelény. So is Aniko’s mother, Aranka Jonap née Szoffer, who now lives in Denver. Miguel and Aniko are Edelény originals. Growing up, Aniko in Miskolc, Hungary, Miguel in Mexico City, they each heard endless tales of this fabled town: summer swims in the Bodva River, the coal mine that Aniko’s father owned, one-room schoolhouses, streets inhabited by large families with children of the same age — and the corresponding friendships.
The idyll they described reminded me of my grandmother’s tales of her hometown, Nyírmeggyes: her father’s successful farm; cherry orchards surrounding their home; close childhood friends down the dirt road. It seems almost a bucolic existence, in my grandmother’s case marred by her father’s untimely passing. Indeed, it was a pastoral life, because many Hungarian (and other European) Jews, unlike most Jews today, did not live urban lives. Their lives were of small villages and the countryside, for some about local industry, for others agrarian.
Twists of fate wind through the Mogyoros’ story: Miguel’s mother, originally from Slovakia, ended up in Edelény because war broke out and the borders were sealed. Unrequited love some time before the war motivated Miguel’s oldest uncle, José, to seek his fortunes in the new world, a fortuitous decision that later served to rescue five of Miguel’s aunts and uncles from the Holocaust. (After the war, José brought two more siblings to Mexico, one of them Miguel’s father.)
“My oldest uncle, in ’38, went back to Edelény to visit,” recounts Miguel. The writing was literally on the wall. In Germany, this uncle had seen “signs about no Jews and no dogs allowed on the train, so he started bringing out all the siblings from the oldest to the youngest,” one of the sisters even emigrating as a mail order bride.
Others from Edelény wound up in Mexico: Weisser, the teacher in the one-room Jewish schoolhouse; the Weinsteins, greengrocers in Hungary, who then ran a supermarket chain in their adopted homeland. In total, four Edelény families settled in Mexico; others emigrated to Israel, the United States and even Australia.
The names of these Edelény families trip off the tongues of both Aniko and Miguel. They were, and are, household names.
“Every time they got together, your mother and my father,” says Miguel, “they would talk about this one, what happened to that one . . . ”
“There was a bond between these Edelény people,” says Aniko. “Wherever you went, the first thing you did was to find people from Edelény and look them up.
“I guess [Miguel’s] father hadn’t heard from my mother since before the war; when he heard that we were in New York [Aniko’s family escaped Hungary during the 1956 uprising], he looked us up.”
Families in Edelény were close, but not related. “The closest thing,” says Aniko, “was that [Miguel] and I got married.” Before the war, she says, it was not accepted that people within the same town would marry each other.
By the time Aniko and Miguel met, years after the war and the destruction it wrought, “[Miguel’s] uncle was so happy when we got engaged.”
For Miguel, visiting Edelényites was part and parcel of his young adulthood. On family trips from Mexico City to New York, he and his father would make the rounds, from the Upper West Side to Williamsburg, tracking down former neighbors, from a chasidic family to a single man.
When Miguel attended yeshiva in Israel, his father visited. Once again, they set off: a chasidic family in Jerusalem, a Glattstein in Haifa, and, intersecting with my story, another Glattstein in Jerusalem who ran a parfumerie on Jaffa Road, which I was able to later inform Miguel was run by Miriam and her husband. Miriam, in turn, remembers the Mogyoroses visiting the shop.
The Mogyoroses have made several trips back to Edelény: Aniko once as a child together with her parents, to visit her grandfather’s grave before the family fled Hungary; the two of them during the communist era; and later as a family with their four sons.
The swimming hole where their parents once frolicked during summer days is now a trickle; the majestic castle was transformed during communist times into a military barracks, then later used to rehouse displaced populations; family homes have been torn down.
I witnessed that economic deprivation on my visit to Edelény in 2012. It’s a town now stripped of all industry and sustenance, with third-generation unemployment and empty streets.2
But the Edelény of yore lives in the memories of the Mogyoros family.
This small Hungarian town, with only 50 families, had a surprisingly strong Jewish infrastructure: a cheder [boys’ school], a girls’ school, a yeshiva. Most of the families were religious, some were not, one or two were chasidic. Notwithstanding small town gossip, everyone, according to the stories the Mogyoroses heard as children, got along. Most families were in business — chiefly textiles, coal or lumber.
People looked out for each other, says Aniko. Miriam Glattstein’s recollections mirrored this sentiment. She told me that her Uncle Ferenc came to Edelény after his brother-in-law, Miriam’s father (probably the manager at the coal mine Aniko’s father owned), offered to help him find work. According to Miriam, her father was true to his word, and Ferenc ran a good trade in Edelény.
This sense of community was passed on to the children. The descendants of the surviving Edelény families raised funds several years back for a much-needed cemetery repair.
This first generation, in turn, transmitted the devotion to Edelény to their progeny — witness the interest from Aniko and Miguel’s son Dov in the Edelény connection.
“There was something about that town that people loved . . . the people who were from there, or maybe it was just the memories,” says Aniko. “They had wonderful memories. I have never, ever heard of anyone speaking badly about this town. When they got together, they had nothing but accolades.”
V.
Webster’s dictionary defines genealogy as “the history of a particular family showing how the different members of the family are related to each other.”
Yet it is so much more than pedigree. Genealogy is an exploration into people: who they were, how they lived, their surroundings, their relationships. It is a glimpse into bygone days and lives.
Genealogy, I have learned, leads to discovery, to seeing old friends in new ways, to connecting with people long thought passed, to forming new relationships with distant relatives.
Contrary to how I felt following my trip to Hungary, I know now that this journey is not over, and probably never will be. So much remains to be uncovered, not only from my grandmother’s story, but, now that my interest is kindled, from my other family lines.
Constructing the family tree is only the beginning; the real journey lies in traversing its branches. Much like the eponymous Velveteen Rabbit, the people and places of the past only become real when we treat them as such.
This essay is dedicated to the memories of Esther and Ferenc Klein, and their children Edith, Kati, Zsofi and Tibi, all of whom have no descendants. May they all rest in peace and may their names be remembered.
NOTES
1. Esther’s husband Ferenc Klein died of typhus in Buchenwald soon after the war ended. Like thousands of others, liberation for him did not mean survival. He had two brothers; neither of them survived the Holocaust. No one remained from that branch of the Klein family.
2. On their first trip to Edelény, the Mogyoroses had difficulty locating the cemetery. Someone suggested they stop someone older and ask. The person they stopped, who directed them to the overgrown cemetery, had worked in Aniko’s grandfather’s mine before the war. When he left them at the cemetery, he said, “Ever since they took the Jews, this place has gone downhill.”
